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Category Archives: Alarm technologies

In a few of the previous posts, I’ve discussed some principles used in the radio communications in alarms. I’ve mentioned that some features are harder to implement well using one-way radios. What is the difference between one-way and two-way? What practical difference will it make?

Radio communications can be one-way or two-way, depending on how they have been designed.

A one-way system has a transmitter in each of the detectors and a receiver in the panel. This means that the detectors can send signals to the panel, but the panel cannot send signals to the detectors.

In a two-way system, each component has both a transmitter and receiver. This means that the detectors are now capable of receiving a signal from the panel.

It is fairly normal for the two-way systems to use a combined transmitter and receiver called a “transceiver”. Whilst not a strict limitation, most of these transceivers can only transmit or receive at any given moment in time (this is called half duplex). They can switch from receive to transmit very quickly, so from a user perspective they look like they are transmitting and receiving at the same time.

Most older systems use one-way radio. I suspect this is because there were not easy to use, cheap integrated RF transceivers available 10 or 20 years ago. Often they will use a simple AM transmitter built from discrete components or one of the very old remote control ICs that require an 8-bit address (these are common in wirelessly controlled mains sockets still).

A lot of newer systems use two-way radio. They will use one of the modern integrated RF transceivers like the TI CCxxxx, Si4432, or any of the Nordic Semi products. These do all of the hard RF work (and even a lot of the packet handling and encoding, sometimes even encryption) for you, and are controlled using a simple digital serial protocol. They are very cheap and versatile.

What are the practical limitations of one-way radios?

There are an awful lot of them – too many to list really. Let’s cover a few really key ones

Detectors have no idea if the system is armed or not

There is no way for a detector to know if the system is armed or not as it cannot receive any information.

This means that they always have to behave as if the system was armed. This behaviour has to be a balance of responding to alarms quickly vs preserving battery life. This trade-off is often accomplished by holding-off alarm detection for a period of a few minutes after an alarm has been raised.

It also means that they try to send supervisory “OK” status messages as infrequently as possible – and by standards, this can be up to 240 minutes.

This has practical implications for how responsive an alarm system can be.

The panel cannot ping the detectors when it is armed

Two-way panels all actively check the presence and status of detectors at the moment the system is armed. If any are in tamper, contacts open, detectors missing, or batteries low, the user will be warned (and possibly, arming the alarm is not allowed). This is very similar to how a wired system works.

One-way systems need to rely on the last alarm or status message received. They could be from a long time prior and could be out of date.

Jamming detection is much harder

Jamming detection in a two-way system is easy. Panel sends out a ping, detector responds. If no response is received after several pings, we can assume that communication has been lost for some reason.

Also in a two-way system, when the alarm is actually triggered, the detector will keep on sending alarm signals until it receives an acknowledgement response from the panel.

In one-way systems we need to wait to see if we miss several supervisory signals to know that signals aren’t getting through. This can take hours.

Some one-way systems have passive jamming detection systems. They listen to the RF channel all of the time, and if the channel is in use a lot of the time, they assume it is being jammed. It doesn’t work very well (I will go into this another time). They have to side with less false alarms and lower sensitivity, and the result of this is that they are easy to jam.

Above all, when the alarm goes off in a one way system, all it does is send the signal for a reasonable period of time and assumes that the panel has received it. There is no way for it to be acknowledged.

Rolling code and encryption is much harder to do well

In a previous post, I discussed how rolling code systems can’t just accept the next code in the sequence – they need to accept codes over a wide window, possibly the next 256 valid codes. This is because the transmission is not guaranteed to be received and the transmitter hops forwards regardless.

With a two way system, this window can be avoided. The keyfob can continue to send the same code in the sequence until the panel sends a message back saying that it has been received (this is a simple explanation of how it could work, pure rolling code is rare in two-way systems).

Alongside this, one-way radio makes exchanging keys in encryption systems difficult. A similar concept to the window of valid codes needs to be used to ensure that transmissions are received correctly after a key changes. For this reason, encryption keys in one-way systems are most often fixed (though they can be exchanged during the initial pairing).

Conceptually, it’s exactly the same as two people trying to communicate reliably with each other, where one of them can only speak and the other only listen. There’s also a 2 year old in the room who won’t shut up (interference), and another guy who is actively trying to make sure everything goes wrong (a malicious attacker).

This raises another interesting aside – alarm systems always need to find a balance between security and reliability of communications. There is little use in ensuring that communications are completely secure if it means alarm messages do not make it through.

As with alarms, there are different grades of signalling devices. These go from grade 1 (low risk, doesn’t seem to be used much or at all) to grade 4 (high risk, banks, jewellers). It’s common for the signalling device to be a higher grade than the alarm system, although this is not mandated.

Grade 4 requires encryption, protection from message substitution and replay etc. One provider, WebWayOne has built a system that uses several proven technologies like AES-128 and other widely known cryptographic fundamentals.

One of WebWayOne’s representatives said on the forum:

“Once these techniques are in place they may as well be deployed across all grades if system, it makes no sense not to.”

This is an awesome attitude to have and, to me, signals that these guys have actually understood the challenges in implementing a secure protocol. They are not weakening lower grade systems by weakening the cryptography and protocol.

Why do I think this is sound reasoning? It’s probably easier to argue why weakening the cryptography and protocol is not a good idea – here are some ways I have seen it done in other systems using cryptography (not alarm signalling systems – I am extending my reasoning from other products to apply to them).

Reducing key-length

Some products differentiate different grades of security by reducing key length. This tends to be a bad idea.

Practically all cryptographic techniques are vulnerable to brute-force attacks – it really is just trying every single key, one by one. It’s accepted at the moment that 40, 56 and 64 bit keys are not long enough to protect against brute-force attacks. 112 bit (twice 56, used in keying method 2 in triple DES) and 128 bit are currently long enough to protect against brute-force attacks. This will change in the future, but we are safe for a good few years yet.

Anything above 128 bits is therefore deemed wasteful – your highest grade product could use 128 bits and be secure. You could alter your lower grade product to use 64 bit keys. To the lay person, you might think that this would take half the time to brute force – but it is actually easier by a factor of 2^64 (18446744073709551616 times easier).

You could offer 127 bit encryption – this would take half the time to crack. But what would be the point? It would be product differentiation for no reason, and implementing a custom key length nearly always means you are “rolling your own” and will make mistakes.

Altering the protocol

Changing the protocol in anyway would also be an odd way to differentiate a lower grade.

Outside of key length, most aspects of a protocol are either a binary secure/not secure. You can’t offer 50% of message authentication. You can’t offer 50% of a secure means of key exchange. They are either present and secure, present and insecure, or not present at all.

If any aspect of a secure protocol is deemed insecure, it’s highly likely that the whole thing will fall apart. This isn’t always the case, but it’s fairly usual to see a theoretical vulnerability against a single part (say, the message authentication) turn into a full blown practical exploit against the whole thing. This means you need to tread carefully when trying to artificially weaken a protocol.

The hardware is there anyway

Signaling systems don’t have the same constraints as wireless detectors. They have plentiful power and space, which affords the use of comparatively powerful hardware.

Most detectors use 8-bit microcontrollers like the PIC, ATmega, or 8051 built into the CC1110. They run using slow clock rates (this lowers power consumption) and have limited RAM and register space. Implementing full blown cryptographic schemes in these is not easy, especially when you move up to something like RSA with 1024 bit keys (RSA is public key cryptography, where you need a much longer key to be secure than with symmetric cryptography like AES).

I have not seen inside any IP signaling devices, but I would wager that they use modern, powerful 32-bit processors like the ARM, with plentiful RAM and fast clocks. There are cryptographic libraries already available on these processors that allow you to easily build a secure protocol.

This hardware is likely the same across all grades. Again, it just makes no sense to build a lower grade system using different hardware to artificially constrain it.

Testing

Properly pen testing products, as compared to “test house” testing to standards, is a time consuming, expensive and highly skilled job. Having two distinct products, even if they only different slightly in hardware and software, would really require two distinct pen tests to be performed. This is cost you do not need to bear. Test the grade 4 product, use the same hardware and software for grade 2, and you have just tested both at the same time.

Differentiate on the tangible aspects

When it comes down to it, all of this doesn’t really matter to the customer. They just want something secure. So differentiate on the tangible things – how long the signalling takes to report issues, and the response to alarms.

And talked about how, although they are useful techniques to make an alarm better, they need to be implemented correctly.

Now, I am going to briefly cover encryption, and how it can go wrong.

What is encryption?

At a very basic level, encrypting something is encoding a message in a way which means an eavesdropper cannot determine the contents of the message.

There are many techniques – the one most familiar to people is a substitution cipher, where each letter is substituted for another.

In the real world, encryption uses more advanced techniques than this. Some encryption techniques are, to all intents and purposes, impossible to crack – unless you know the secret key, you are not going to find out what is in the message.

Sounds great! Where do I sign up? Many alarm manufacturers use encryption, and many don’t do it quite right.

Designing a good encryption scheme is hard

“Anyone can invent an encryption algorithm they themselves can’t break; it’s much harder to invent one that no one else can break”

Time and time again, custom built encryption algorithms have been broken.

Again, I’m sure there is a more concise saying about this, but I subscribe to this:

For a defender to succeed, he must have a 100% success rate against multiple attacks and attackers.

For an attacker to succeed, he only needs to succeed once.

What’s the solution to this:

Use something off-the-shelf. There are mathematicians and developers who only develop encryption. Use their skills, don’t try to use your own.

Open your code up – no encryption algorithm or implementation should be weakened by an attacker seeing the code. So open it up and let other people tell you the problems!

Encryption is often good in theory and fails in the implementation

Very closely linked to the above point – even if you use something off the shelf, make sure you use it right!

Common mistakes are:

Leaking key material by XORing the key with a constant padding value (in a previous post!)

Building a really strong encryption scheme but then failing to exchange the key in a secure way (i.e. you show everyone the key!)

Encryption by itself does not stop replay attacks

If the message “disarm the system” becomes “fodst, yjr dudyr,” when encrypted, there may be no easy way for the attacker to decode that message. Indeed, there would be no easy way for him to encode that message unless he had the key.

This may not matter though. You can infer what the message contains based on timing (the homeowner has just arrived, and pressed the disarm button), and replay the encrypted packet alone. You need to combine encryption with other techniques to ensure integrity and protect against replays.

Again, this is partly the result of using a one-way radio system. Before the detector and panel can communicate, they need to perform key exchange, so that they both know the secret key. There are a few options here:

You can send the key in the clear when paired and hope no one is listening.

Method 3 is attractive. On paper, your system is “encrypted” – you could even claim AES-128 encryption. But if that key is constant across every detector and every panel you sell, you have a problem. Why is this?

Firstly, you can never really assume that your code is safe. Whilst most modern microprocessors have some means of protecting code, this is by no means fail-safe. Sometimes designers forget to set the lock bits (well, quite often in fact), and the code can just be read out. Some PIC processors are vulnerable to a simple attack where you can recover 75% of the code from one device, and the remaining 25% from another (one manufacturer’s detectors have this issue). If you want to go further, you can decapsulate the microcontroller and read one-time-programmable memory visually – this is possible in the real world.

Secondly, it is sometimes the case that the alarm architecture means that I don’t need to know this key. Some alarms have an RF SoC performing all encryption – the main microcontroller just passes it simple unencrypted data. I can decouple the RF SoC and send my own, unencrypted data, and let the SoC do the hard work for me.

Thirdly, manufacturers offer firmware upgrades for download. These can contain the secret key material. It’s often easy to find – key material should look very random (more random than normal code). I have a simple tool to scan a file and graph entropy. It’s fairly easy to find key material using this, especially if you know how long the key is.

Using too short a key

One method of breaking encryption is to just try every single key and hope for the best – this is called “brute forcing“.

If the key is short, this process can be very quick.

Each time I add a single bit to a key, I double how many possibilities there are. A 1-bit key has 2, a 2-bit key 4, 3-bit has 8. This rapidly hits very large numbers – even at 32-bit we have 4294967296 keys. But modern computers are very, very fast – checking 100,000 keys a second is possible. That 32-bit key would fall in under 12 hours.

So key length has a big impact on how long it takes to perform this process. It’s now pretty much assumed a key length of 64-bits and under is too short to protect against brute forcing. But DES and other encryption methods still support 40-bit and 56-bit keys. If the option is there, people will take it.

Conclusion

Encryption is important in a wireless protocol if you want it to be genuinely secure – but it is only part of picture. If implemented badly, it can add little security and decrease reliability and usability.

In the last post about technologies used in alarms, I discussed the use of spread spectrum. Another really common keyword seen on marketing material is “rolling code”. What is it, why is it used, and what problems are there with it?

Why?

A wireless alarm system might send a signal from a keyfob to the panel to say “disarm the system”. If the content of this packet does not change in any way from time to time, we could simply record this packet and replay it at a later time.

This is commonly called a replay attack. There are alarm systems available that are vulnerable to this attack – the older Yale Wireless Alarm systems (434MHz ones) and Friedland SL series are examples. There are “Universal cloning remotes” on eBay for less than £5 that will clone any alarm using 434MHz OOK signalling. You can also use an Arduino and cheap receiver to listen out for signals and store them for later replay.

It is desirable to have a means of stopping these replay attacks from happening.

There is nothing in the EN50131-5-3 specification that means a grade 2 alarm needs any protection against these attacks. Most newer alarms do however have some protection.

How?

The attack is possible because the signal doesn’t ever change – it is always “disarm the system”.

To protect against a pure replay attack, we just need to add something that changes each time the signal is sent. How about the time? “disarm the system 21:22:32 26/04/2013”

This works. There is now no way for me to record a packet and use it again later.

But a really malicious attacker could work out how to take a packet recorded earlier, modify the time, and replay it.

This is where rolling code comes into play – instead of appending the time, we add a code to the packet. This code changes each time a packet is sent. The receiver and transmitter have agreed how this code will change – generally using a psuedo-random number generator.

The packet now becomes “disarm the system 204389473692”, the next time it will be “disarm the system 937459384322” and so on.

The sequence of this codes is essentially random to an observer, and the code is long enough that it makes guessing the next one very difficult.

Unlike spread spectrum, this sequence is generally extremely long in small systems.

Keeloq is a proprietary implementation of a rolling code protocol, often used in car keyless entry systems. The rolling code is 32-bit, which essentially means it is impossible for someone to guess the next code.

Keeloq does have weaknesses. The major one is that it is possible to recover the key used to seed the random number generator. Once you have this, it is far easier to guess the next code. It’s still very challenging though.

What issues are there with rolling code?

Again, the devil is in the detail. Rolling code is a sound principal – but it must be implemented correctly.

Predictable codes

The whole thing falls over if someone can guess the sequence of codes you are using. There are a number of ways that this can happen.

If your code is short (say, 8bits), the an attacker has a 1/256 chance of getting the next code correct if he chooses randomly. If your code is long (say, 32 bits), then it is 1/4294967296. Whatever method you are using to guess the codes, you can clearly see that the longer the code, the harder it will be.

A good pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) can be seeded – you give it a key which determines how it will hop. It shouldn’t matter what the algorithm is or if the attacker knows the algorithm, as long as they don’t know the seed, they shouldn’t be able to predict the sequence. Unfortunately, many products either used a fixed seed across all products (this makes protocol design, especially with a one-way radio, much easier) or the algorithm is bad.

How can the algorithm be bad? Say we have a PRNG with this output when seeded with “1”:

7, 3, 4, 1, 3, 6, 1, 3, 2

If I were to seed it with “2”, the output should be completely different:

8, 3, 3, 2, 7, 1, 5, 3, 1

But some systems simply use the seed to skip some of the output i.e. with a seed of “2”:

3, 4, 1, 3, 6, 1, 3, 2, 8

Notice this is just the first sequence shifted along one digit!

If I know the entire sequence, then all I need to do is gather a few packets and I can work out where we are in the sequence. The number of packets I need varies, but with a poor PRNG or short code, it’s not very many!

Worse still, some “rolling code” systems use a code like:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Whilst this might protect against casual replay attacks, it is not hard for an attacker to guess the next number.

Limitations with one-way radios

If your keyfob can transmit but not receive, there is a small problem. Each time it transmits, the code rolls forward. There is no guarantee that the receiver will hear the transmission.

This means that the transmitter’s code can be further ahead in the sequence than the receiver. This needs to be taken account of – what happens if you are idly pressing the disarm button in your pocket whilst waiting for the bus?

Most systems deal with this by checking for a valid code over a “window” of acceptable values. This could, say, be the next 256 codes. This has an interesting effect on guessing. If I have a 16 bit code, there are 65,536 possibilities. If the window was only 1 long, I would have a 1/65,536 chance of randomly guessing the code. If the window is 256 long, we reduce this by a factor of 256 – to 1/256. That’s a big difference.

Message substitution

A very simple rolling code implementation just appends the pseudo-random code onto the message i.e. “disarm the system 878463098273”

There is no link between the message (“disarm the system”) and the code (“878463098273”).

This means we can change the message and use the same code, providing that the receiver hasn’t received the code.

How could this be done? I’ll give one possible attack.

When you press “arm the system” on the keyfob, it will actually send more than one packet, to ensure that the receiver gets the message. We have something like:

arm the system 736474747363

arm the system 093219457437

arm the system 384838738383

arm the system 732878476655

If I am in the position to jam the receiver, but still receive the genuine packet, I can do the following:

1. Record all 4 packets.

2. Immediately replay the first two to arm the alarm so the user does not see an issue:

arm the system 736474747363

arm the system 093219457437

3. Hold onto the last two packets.

4. Change the messages on the second two packets to:

disarm the system 384838738383

disarm the system 732878476655

And bang, we have disarmed the system.

Replay attacks still work

As long as the packet never reaches the receiver, we can still grab a transmission from a keyfob and use it later. This means someone could press the disarm button on your keyfob whilst you are away from the house (say, when you pass your keys to the checkout assistant to scan your loyalty card), and then replay it later.

Conclusion

Rolling code, again, is a good idea, and if implemented well, can protect against a lot of attacks. Many systems do not implement it well though – the above vulnerabilities can be found in real world alarm systems.

A much more robust solution is to use timestamps in the messages and then use encryption and a message authentication code.

If anyone is interested, Atmel have a really good app note on implementing a secure algorithm with one-way radios.

Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) is a method of transmitting radio signals by rapidly switching a carrier among many frequency channels, using a pseudorandom sequence known to both transmitter and receiver.

A diagram is a clear way of showing this:

Time vs channel

This is a really basic example with only 5 channels. The channel changes for each time slot, and the hopping pattern is a rather predictable 4, 1, 5, 2 3. Both the transmitter and receiver know this hopping pattern and hop at the same interval.

Practical systems tend to use large numbers of channels (50 upwards) and hop frequently (hundreds of times a second).

This technique is used by Bluetooth and other technologies.

There is another form of spread spectrum called Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum, where the hops are faster than the data rate. This is rarely used in small embedded systems, but is used in WiFi.

What are the advantages of FHSS?

Resistance to jamming and interference

The most obvious advantage is that narrowband interference or jamming (jamming is really just intentional interference) will only cause a problem for one of the channels, so a signal can still make it through.

Jamming, I hope you like jamming too

In the image above, there is interference on channel 2. None of the signal on channel 2 will be received, but all of the other channels are still fine. Even if you continue to use channel 2, 80% of packets will make it through.

Resistance to eavesdropping

At least at a superficial level, you could conceive that an eavesdropper would have to know the hopping pattern to be able to listen it to a FHSS signal. For this reason, some think the FHSS provides added security.

Transmitting with higher power

This is not intrinsic to the technique of FHSS, it is more related to regulatory requirements. A big problem with most ISM band radio systems is contention for channel access. The most common technique to avoid problems (without using spread spectrum) is to limit the duty cycle to 1% or below. This gives other devices a chance to use the channel.

FHSS avoids this issue as you are only using one of a number of channels in a group. Multiple devices can be using the same group of channels and it is unlikely they will want to use the same channel at the same time. Contention is less of an issue for this reason.

This is turn means that more devices can operate in a given area. The area a transmitter operates in is defined by it’s output power – a higher power can transmit further.

The lower chance of contention means that FHSS devices are allowed to transmit with a higher power, and hence tend to have longer range.

What are the problems?

It sounds like FHSS is a great idea. But, as always, the devil is in the detail.

You cannot rely on FHSS to provide protection from eavesdropping

If we take a practical example of one alarm system – this hops over 50 frequencies in the US version (which is the FCC’s minimum number) at a rate of 64 hops per second. This might sound fast, but it really isn’t.

The CC1110 RF SoC has built in support for FHSS. Using a technique whereby you pre-calibrate the frequency synthesiser, a hop time of ~75uS can easily be achieved. You can essentially turn it into a scanner – scanning all 50 frequencies as quickly as you can. This takes 3.75ms, a lot less than the dwell time of 15.625ms (1/64).

I might not be able to receive all of the packet – I’m going to miss at least some of the start of it – but I can receive some.

More to the point, I can record the hopping pattern. The design of most wireless systems means that this will never change.

The CCxxxx chips are used in a lot of alarm systems – from the low-end Friedland SL series to the high-end Texecom Ricochet. When they are used in alarm systems, they tend to be used conservatively – they need to work correctly all of the time. As a reverse engineer and hacker, I can push these chips to their limits and just hope that they work well enough to meet my goals once.

The same system mentioned above is sold in the UK but only hops over 4 frequencies. I don’t think this even meets regulatory requirements (another downside to self-certification), but it provides no protection against eavesdropping or even interference.

Predictable or simple pseudo-random hopping patterns

Both transmitter and receiver need to decide on a hopping pattern ahead of time. There are a number of techniques used to do this – you can store a predefined pattern in memory, or generate one using built in hardware or software.

A cold hard fact of pseudo-random number generation though is that the pattern will repeat at some point. This could be after 127bits or 32767bits or anything really depending on how it is implemented. Small embedded systems tend to use patterns that repeat after short periods though – PN9 (i.e. 511bits) is common.

This means it is entirely feasible to record the hopping pattern. It’s very likely this pattern will be re-used.

Some systems make it possible to look at the firmware and see the code that generates the hopping pattern.

Sequences are the same across all equipment

It’s hard to make every single device “custom”. This isn’t really a manufacturing concern – most devices are programmed at some point with a unique serial number. It’s more a protocol design issue – communicating a secret between devices ahead of time is hard work, especially on a one-way radio system. It’s also hard to work with 10 different transmitters using 10 different hopping patterns.

This means all detectors and all panels across every system made might use the same sequence. It only takes a small amount of effort for an attacker to determine this sequence and reuse it time and time again.

FHSS is complicated by other functionality

One of the advantages of FHSS is resistance to interference. As shown in the diagram above, if channel 2 is interfered with, we will only lose 20% of packets.

This is still a 20% packet loss – if other layers of the protocol aren’t designed to take account of this, it could totally cripple the system.

For this reason, many FHSS systems also employ adaptive frequency agility (AFA). If they detect a problem on a given channel, that channel will be taken out of use.

Adaptive frequency agility

How could this be a problem? Well, how long do I take that channel out of use for? What happens if more than 50% of my channels are taken out of use? There needs to be some kind of mechanism to bring the channels back into use at some point.

The design of AFA algorithms is complex, and mistakes are made. It can be possible to game them into a state where they believe that most channels are unusable. A parallel to this is mesh networking routing algorithms – you can sometimes game the system into believing there are no valid routes with only a few carefully crafted packets.

Conclusion

Whilst FHSS is a useful technique to improve interference and jamming immunity, it should never be relied on for security – that is what encryption and MAC is for.

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